Mobile devices such as smartphones, notebook and laptop computers, PDAs (personal digital assistants), tablet computing devices, and so forth, are extremely prolific, and are extensively used to provide convenient storage and/or printing of various documents and data. Such devices are able to store the documents and data of the user, and allow the user to access such information in many different locations. When users with such mobile devices wish to print documents, files or other information stored on the mobile devices, information is transmitted via a print aware mobile application to a print device directly or through an intermediate processing device using mechanisms such as print.
The print documents, files, or other information to be printed may be dynamic and may include variable and/or fixed data. The user and/or the system may replace and/or enter the variable data at the time of printing with particular values and choices. For example, business cards include both fixed and variable data, personalized to the user, and are printed on-demand, on an ad-hoc basis.
In addition to replacing and/or entering the variable data, often times a user may also need to customize the style and/or content (fixed data and/or variable data) in order to make the print document context specific based on location, intended use, or other such parameters. For example, a user printing business cards for distribution in China may need to print the business cards such that they include localized context such as phone numbers printed using the local conventions and local language. A user may of course manually choose a document that is already localized to the context, but this requires more work, is confusing (especially if the user is unfamiliar with the printer functions), and may be inconvenient. The manual process is also cumbersome if performed on a small display mobile device such as smartphones, and is error prone.
The current disclosure discloses a system and method to determine the context in which a print job is generated for producing context specific variable print documents from mobile devices, using features of mobile devices that are widely deployed and available.